THE BUSINESS SECRETS OF SUCCESSFUL YOGA TEACHERS

Yoga teacher trainings will develop your teaching skills, but how do you then run a profitable yoga business and become a successful yoga teacher if you don’t have the business skills?

Becoming a confident and authentic yoga teacher is just one part of being a successful yoga teacher and it’s unfortunate that many excellent teachers don’t have business skills under the belt to really succeed in making a good living teaching yoga.

And these business skills are essential. Being a yoga teacher and being a business owner simply require different skill sets.

Knowing how to build an engaged community and how to extend your offering to bring multiple income streams into your business is essential if you really want to sustain teaching yoga full time and not get burnt out in the process.

Most yoga teachers are struggling financially. Some teachers are spending their week teaching 20+ classes and are still struggling to pay the bills.

When you take a closer look at this, those teachers are being paid for their time teaching in the studio but they’re also spending time travelling from studio to studio and planning classes. Time that’s not necessarily paid for.

In the long term, this option is not a sustainable way to make a living from teaching yoga.

The other option is to build a profitable and sustainable yoga business and to do this you need to learn new skills and look at generating other income streams.

Ultimately, your success will depend on WHO you are as a person, because being a yoga teacher does not start and end with attending a yoga teacher training and receiving a certificate.

Being a successful yoga teacher is made up of multiple elements that will impact your successes and your failures.

Failure can sometimes be the very best thing that happens, because it forces you to grow. And out of that growth, your yoga teaching career can reach new heights.

In order to have a “successful” yoga career, you first need to determine what that means to you—whether it’s owning your own studio or positively impacting the lives of your students. Whatever your goals, the reality is teaching yoga is a challenging career path.

Start with a vision

Retreats, workshops, online classes, corporate….

There are so many things yoga teachers can offer – but you can’t do them all.

When you try to do some many things, a lot of these things will not be in alignment with what you truly want for yourself. Defining your vision helps you to narrow down on where to put your engird and go after it.

The more you can crystallise your intention of what you want to create for yourself and then create daily habits to help you get there, the more you can manifest it.

Know your message

What’s your story? Why are you teaching?

Your personal journey behind why started your career is the most authentic part of you. Once you have crafted your signature story, that should be the foundation of your message in every thing you do.

Right now, authenticity sells better than anything. Make a practice of being entirely transparent and showing all sides of yourself as yoga teacher.

Personality is a differentiator. To a non-pro, most classes are similar, but either hard or easy. This means the differentiator is how the teacher talks during the poses. Are you calm and soothing? Are you funny and irreverent? If you just tell people the list of poses you’ll do, you aren’t special at all.

With highly successful yoga teachers of all ethnicities, shapes, genders, and personalities, know that you too can be yourself and people will love you for it. It’s what will attract ideal students – your niche – who truly align with you and keep them coming back.

Create a higher priced offering

Public classes don’t pay the bills, but those classes build awareness and give you exposure. Once you have that, then you want to stay connected to your students through email newsletters and social media.

Use these channels to “listen” and find out what your community that connect to you as yoga teacher really want from you.

When you know what your ideal students want, you can then create higher-priced offerings that match their needs, whether that’s workshops, retreats, or private classes.

Build your online hub

Having a website can open up opportunities to generate extra income and more freedom.

Your website is the foundation to everything you do, it’s your home and hub for your community. So when you have higher priced premium products such as retreats, private classes, yoga coaching and e-courses, your website will help you to promote these offerings.

So these extra income generators could be workshops or retreats or teaching online.

With the rise of yoga streaming sites, it seems digital yoga is only going to grow.

Once you’ve built up a following, it’s easy to set up a password protected page on your website to host your yoga videos. If you do it yourself, you’ll likely make more money this way than going through a big site that pays per view with so many other – often bigger-name – teachers to get lost among.

Understanding how to take your classes online can help you to reach bigger audiences and can have a huge positive impact on your yoga business.

Learn how to negotiate

A lot of business in yoga is between friends. But business is business. Anytime you establish an agreement, sign a contract and be sure you are protecting yourself.

Get everything on paper and read over every detail so you know your rights. Then negotiate if you don’t agree with any of the terms.

Be OK with networking

Thought you’d escaped corporate culture by choosing to teach yoga? Maybe but networking is still essential in yoga – it’s all about unity after all, isn’t it?

So it makes sense that developing the right connections can be key to a successful yoga career. Partnering with with companies selling products, other teachers, and other professionals, as well as your students can be a powerful way to grow your business. The goal is to create a network of people and businesses you align with that can also help increase your visibility.

Email over social media

If you want to build a sustainable, long lasting yoga business, you must prioritise growing your email list over your social media following.

Social media is rented land with every changing algorithms and if Facebook or Instagram closed their doors tomorrow, how would you contact your followers?

True success comes from the relationships you can nurture over email and the research confirms that people on your email list are more likely to buy (book) than people that follow you on social media.

So get on board with email marketing now, don’t put it off, and a year down the line when people are booking your yoga retreats as a result of your email, you’ll be smiling inside that you made the decision to start growing your list.

Never stop learning

All the best yoga instructors, never stop improving on their craft. If you believe that you are all-knowing as soon as you have finished your training, you will never become as successful as you could be if you choose to live every day with an open mind.

Every time advice is taken from someone else, you will find yourself in a better position than ever before, and consequently at some point, in a position to give out that advice for yourself.

Continuing to participate in training classes and workshops, in addition to keeping up-to-date with the relevant reading material will ensure that you continue learning throughout your career. At some point during your time as in instructor, you will come across things that you aren’t quite as good at; taking these realisations on board, and working to improve in each area will mean continued development in your art, day after day.

Prioritize your own practice above all else.

Stepping onto your mat for yourself and nobody else will help you with your message and vision.

You need to have your own regular sadhana—a daily opportunity to connect to spirit. If you neglect self-study and personal practice, it’s very hard to authentically translate your experience to other people.